In what has to be one of the more unusual pieces by the liberal media sounding the alarm on global warming, a piece in Thursday’s New York Times complained about the inability of wealthy (liberal) New Yorkers to wear their lucrative fall clothing due to stretches of warm temperatures in the Empire State.
Profiling a plethora of New Yorkers stricken with this predicament, reporter Miranda Purves explained that “[f]all has long been New York’s proudest season” in terms of fashion but have suffered:
But this has been the warmest fall quarter in 25 years. And while many people are concerned with global catastrophe — contemplating harrowing images of Greenland melting away and scorched earth in Los Angeles — others are just spinning wildly, like the confused leaves, to figure out what autumn in New York means for their wardrobes.
Purves also spoke with owners of high-end stores who have resorted to altering their orders and inventory as a result of the climate change:
The woolen mittens memorialized by Oscar Hammerstein may be languishing on store shelves, but “we sold over 80 units of Dior sunglasses alone in October,” said Elizabeth von der Goltz, a senior vice president and general merchandise manager at Bergdorf Goodman. She herself bought a heavy Burberry cape and hasn’t had call to bust it out since Paris Fashion Week in September.
Although Ms. von der Goltz still sees those traditional “upper tier” department store customers who buy their full fall wardrobes in May, and the second tier of wealthy but busy professionals who do a one-stop for their full fall in September, she said there had been a major shift to “a buy now, wear now” model with “special” replacing “seasonal.”
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Beth Buccini, an owner of the 16-year-old SoHo boutique Kirna Zabête, preordered a different version of the hot (as in temperature) hot (as in trendy) fur-lined parka, by Mr. and Mrs. Italy, back in May. “I’m like a psycho next-level planner because I see everything first and I know what I like,” she said.
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Buyers say that these “precollections” — formerly done by only a few labels and now widely embraced — have become synonymous with “seasonless,” relied upon more and more to keep revenues up as weather-driven shopping becomes increasingly unpredictable and customers, encouraged by the 24/7 Internet, seek more instant-gratification purchases.
“Heaven knows that you cannot control Mother Nature, and so every season it seems that we buy ‘seasonless’ more,” Ms. Buccini said.
Invoking the upcoming United Nations summit in Paris on global warming, Purves also joked that “one might fantasize about the eggheads at M.I.T. devising a new discipline — Fashionology-Climatology? — to explain the mystifying algorithms where both rapidly changing systems intersect.”
